Close Your Eyes and Picture It. Or, Have an Architect Make You an Animation.

The days of t-squares, leaky pens, strange paper, and giant tilting tables are long past. Today the architect’s work is entirely computerized; however, it has only been in the last decade that a true revolution in computing for architects has taken place.

Most people have heard the term CAD, Computer Aided Drafting, and while this type of software allowed architects to increase productivity through standardization of repetitive tasks, for the most part the architect still labored to produce multiple two dimensional drawings which were only related to each other through the arduous task of measuring and remeasuring and measuring again all the parts of the buildings that had to relate to each other. When the architect or his client wanted to see what the project would look like in three dimensions, many more hours of work, creating hand drawn pictures or miniature models would be required. And if the project changed at all, the models, pictures, and other representations all had to be redone from scratch.

The revolution happened when some crafty programmer introduced BIM, Building Information Modeling. These programs allow the architect to draw his plan, elevation, sections and three dimensional computer models all at the same time. Architectural Record reports that about 75% of American architecture firms now use BIM for some part of their work. Like ATXA, many firms see the advantage of using BIM from start to finish allowing the architect and the client to understand both the big ideas and the very small details from early in a project’s life without ever having to redo work.

A popular way of sharing project concepts and design with the client is to use BIM to create animated “fly-through” videos. You can check out examples of ATXA’s animation work at our YouTube Channel here.